Review: Tongues of Serpents (Temeraire Book 6 of 9)

7:20 pm 2 July 2017
Tongues of Serpents - Naomi Novik

Tongues of Serpents is the sixth book in the Temeraire series.  For me, this was the weakest in the series so far.  It wasn’t a bad book, and there wasn’t any particular aspect of it that I disliked, but it didn’t hold my attention as well as the previous books.  I think one big reason was because I disliked so many of the secondary characters.  There were still some good secondary characters around, but they didn’t get that much page time. 

 

But just because I liked this book less, doesn’t mean I disliked it.  There were still plenty of great moments, and this book had an interesting setting that I enjoyed reading about.  The middle part held my interest quite well and several sections had me anxious to learn what would happen next.  There was also a new character introduced who was fun to read about. 

 

I have a few more spoiler-ish comments within the spoiler tags:

 

I thought Iskierka was a little less annoying in this book, but I think that’s just because Caesar and Rankin were even more annoying than she was.  I guess I should have expected Rankin to show back up eventually, but I wasn’t at all happy to see him, and he provides plenty of annoyance in this book.  At least Caesar seems to be more than a match for him, but Caesar is pretty annoying himself.

 

I did love the new dragon, Kulingile, who came from the smallest egg.  I was invested in his story after he hatched, and I was curious about him even before he hatched.  I suspected the smallest egg would end up being something interesting.  It was also nice to have a newly hatched dragon in the party who wasn’t completely obnoxious, unlike Iskierka and Caesar.

 

I also really like Tharkay, which is hard to justify when he gets so little page time.  Even when he’s with the characters the entire time, we see so little of him that sometimes I forget he’s there.  I wish he was in the books more, but I’m glad he keeps showing up.  He seems like the more sensible and reliable character, even more so than the main characters, despite his initial appearance to the contrary.  Authors tend to enjoy sacrificing some well-liked secondary character for emotional impact; I hope Tharkay doesn’t suffer that fate.

(show spoiler)

 

 

Next Book

A standalone book called The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.  I’ve never read anything by Chabon and, happily, I don’t know anything at all about the book.  It was on a list that many of my reading selections come from, and it went on sale not too long ago, so I slotted it into the schedule as one of my series-break books.  After this, I plan to finish up the last three Temeraire books.

fantasy completed series